The secret stories behind iconic movie scenes

When we see movies as finished products, their different scenes flow together so seamlessly that we forget just how much work goes into making them and how many things can go wrong. Screen Rant this week make a terrific new video that unearths some of the secret stories that went on behind the scenes in famous movie scenes, including classic scenes from The Shining, Jurassic Park, Jaws and more.

We won’t go through all of them here but we will list some of our favorite tidbits:

The props department in The Shining had to build thicker doors for the Overlook Hotel because Jack Nicholson was so proficient at hacking into the standard ones with his ax. Even though Nicholson’s character is supposed to be scary, he isn’t supposed to look like Superman. In total Nicholson destroyed 60 different doors before director Stanley Kubrick found a take he deemed worthy.

Some of the best scenes in Jaws were the underwater shots from the shark’s point of view, such as when the camera moves up slowly on someone swimming on a plastic toy raft. The reason this was done was because Steven Spielberg had to film several scenes in which the shark wasn’t at all visible because the robotic sharks built for the movie were constantly being taken in for maintenance. The plus side is that these clever sleights of hand made the movie even more suspenseful.

In the opening scene of Apocalypse Now, Martin Sheen wasn’t acting. He really did great drunk, cut his own hand on glass and break down in tears. The movie was notoriously stressful to make and Sheen literally suffered a heart attack during filming.

These are just three of the cool stories revealed in the video. Check out the rest of them below.